Designer Katie Kime Takes Us Inside Her Westlake Home

The house is said to be a never-ending work-in-progress

Katie Kime and Greg Henry have owned their bright and bold Westlake home for just two years and already have put it through two major renovation projects. Yet the work is just beginning.

Drop by the house on an average morning, and you’re likely to see multiple artisans laboring away, like a woodworker crafting a sliding door for the upstairs media room.

“There’s always someone at the house doing something,” Kime says. “But there’s so much cool stuff that can be done with the house. I want it to be a work of art.”

Kime’s demanding eye is nothing new. She’s the founder and creative director of an eponymous fashion, furniture, and accessories brand, comprising katiekime.com and a 2-year-old showroom on Fifth Street.

To become a work of art, the home must first be a work-in-progress. Kime and Henry—who live in the house with Henry’s three children Will (age 11), Ava (9), and Halle (6), a chocolate labradoodle named Duke and a goldendoodle puppy named Max—bought the house in early 2015 after their real estate agent met their near-impossible wish list: “We wanted to live on a few acres close to downtown,” Kime recalls.

The five-bedroom, 5,000-square-foot home (with a 1,200-square-foot guesthouse) on three acres just seven minutes from downtown checked all of the couple’s boxes. The house, however, had features Kime and Henry didn’t like: travertine tile all over the downstairs, textured walls, and an upstairs bedroom that was no longer being used as a master and, thus, unnecessarily big. A two-month renovation in 2015 replaced the tile with dark wood floors and smoothed and painted the walls, and a four-month remodeling project in 2016 converted the bedroom into a media room and two bedrooms.

Today the home is a mini portfolio of Kime’s brand, featuring many of the same bold colors and patterns you would see in the Fifth Street showroom. This is best seen in the master suite, which is separated from the rest of the downstairs by two white, custom-made sliding doors that feature a pattern designed by Kime and inspired by a similar one at the bar of Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York City, one of her favorite places.

Inside the suite, the master closet features wallpaper and fabric in a banana leaves print. The non-common spaces throughout the house—such as the closets, kids’ rooms, and powder rooms—are where Kime was unafraid to go bold with the design. For example, the guesthouse, which doubles as her artist’s studio, has the feel of a boutique hotel and features pink cabinets.

Meanwhile, for the common areas of the main house, such as the living room, dining room, and kitchen, Kime tempered her design. This is exemplified in the dining room, where she easily could’ve used a wild wallpaper but opted for a muted grasscloth wallcovering instead.

“We’re a family living here,” she says. “The house needs to feel like our home more than it needs to feel like my showroom.”

There’s no doubt that they’ve made the house home. The kids have turned the L-shaped kitchen island into their Grand Central homework station. When the weather is nice, the family often chooses to have dinner and watch TV out on the screened porch. And the pool, tree house, and Sport Court are popular outdoor spots for the kids and their friends in the summer.

​Kime and Henry still have much on their wish list for the house and expect for the projects to eventually move to their expansive outdoor space. “Maybe a fire pit,” she says.

Despite the house being a never-ending renovation zone, it’s worked out as well as the family could’ve imagined.

“When we get home from being away for a while, we’re like, ‘Gosh, how did we get this house?’” Kime says. “We still feel like we can’t believe we found this house. It has been perfect.”